“The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied,” writes Jean Barman, “and it is up to each of us to act as best we can.” The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class.

Working to recognize past actors that have been underrepresented in mainstream histories, Barman’s focus is BC on “the cusp of contact.” The essays in this collection include fascinating, though largely forgotten, life stories of the frontier—that space between contact and settlement, where, for a brief moment, anything seemed possible.

This volume, featuring over thirty archival photographs and illustrations, makes these important and very readable essays accessible to a broader audience for the first time.

Jean Barman, professor emeritus, has published more than twenty books, including On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour Publishing, 2020) and the winner of the 2006 City of Vancouver Book Award, Stanley Park’s Secret (Harbour Publishing, 2005). Her lifelong pursuit to enrich the history of BC has earned her such honours as a Governor General’s Award, a George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award, a Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing and a position as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Jean Barman's profile page

Margery Fee teaches postcolonial literatures, Canadian literature, and First Nations writing at the University of British Columbia. Her recent publications include “Aboriginal Writing in Canada and the Anthology as Commodity” (Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Renée Hulan, ECW Press, 1999), and “Who Can Write as Other?” (The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Routledge, 1995). She has published on Indigenous writers Jeannette Armstrong, Beatrice Culleton, Keri Hulme, and Mudrooroo Narogin, and has just completed editing a special double issue of Canadian Literature on Thomas King.

Margery Fee's profile page

• Short-listed, Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award

“Reading a book by local historian Jean Barman is like looking at the negative of a well-loved picture. By reversing the light and the dark, she forces us to see the edges, the margins, the details pushed aside by the Technicolor myths of accepted history.”

Geoff D’Auria, <i>Vancouver Review</i>

“On the Cusp of Contact is robust and well produced, with excellent illustrations. It is ideal for courses across a range of disciplines (history, sociology, education), but in fact, because it so successfully enriches our common understanding, it deserves a place on everyone’s bookshelf.”

Ian Chunn, <i>BC Bookworld</i>